November 20, 2002

the first post

Welcome, everyone, to "famous and nonfamous strangers." As this is mostly a message to those of you who expressed an interest in contributing, I've filed it under "nonfamous nonstrangers"-- as you are friends of mine and strangers only to the millions of adoring fans who will one day read the site.

I'm going to post a separate message about all the other categories we're starting out with-- though I expect more to come later.

Setting this up was so much easier than I expected. In the course of 24 hours, I registered a domain, set up hosting, and got MT installed on the server (by the nice people who wrote it). I am remembering how little I know about HTML, but for the most part I am insulated from all that.

I've set up a few people of you as "authors" initially, and I'd like to get all of you up and posting before I add others. I know everyone's busy, but this is all about a multiplicity of voices-- and my selfish desire to hear more of the smart, insightful, and funny things my friends have to say.

I'm going to hang back a little with my own entries for a while, in part because I'm still doing a lot of back-end tweaking and in part because I know what I sound like and don't want to hear myself talk.

With that, enough of this message. Welcome, thanks for trying this out, and please give me feedback. If you're not having fun after a week or so, let me know.